Rita Frances Dove is an American poet and essayist. From 1993 to 1995, she served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. She is the first African American to have been appointed since the position was created by an act of Congress in 1986 from the previous "consultant in poetry" position (1937–86). Dove also received an appointment as "special consultant in poetry" for the Library of Congress's bicentennial year from 1999 to 2000. Dove is the second African American to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, in 1987, and she served as the Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2004 to 2006. Since 1989, she has been teaching at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where she held the chair of Commonwealth Professor of English from 1993 to 2020; as of 2020, she holds the chair of Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing.
Christian Karlson "Karl" Stead is a New Zealand writer whose works include novels, poetry, short stories, and literary criticism. He is one of New Zealand's most well-known and internationally celebrated writers.
Dušan Simić, known as Charles Simic, was a Serbian American poet and co-poetry editor of the Paris Review. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1990 for The World Doesn't End and was a finalist of the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 for Selected Poems, 1963–1983 and in 1987 for Unending Blues. He was appointed the fifteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 2007.
Donald Andrew Hall Jr. was an American poet, writer, editor, and literary critic. He was the author of over 50 books across several genres from children's literature, biography, memoir, essays, and including 22 volumes of verse. Hall was a graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy, Harvard, and Oxford. Early in his career, he became the first poetry editor of The Paris Review (1953–1961), the quarterly literary journal, and was noted for interviewing poets and other authors on their craft.
Philip Levine was an American poet best known for his poems about working-class Detroit. He taught for more than thirty years in the English department of California State University, Fresno and held teaching positions at other universities as well. He served on the Board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets from 2000 to 2006, and was appointed Poet Laureate of the United States for 2011–2012.
Daniel Gerard Hoffman was an American poet, essayist, and academic. He was appointed the twenty-second Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1973.
Derek Mahon was an Irish poet. He was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland but lived in a number of cities around the world. At his death it was noted that his, "influence in the Irish poetry community, literary world and society at large, and his legacy, is immense". President of Ireland Michael D Higgins said of Mahon; "he shared with his northern peers the capacity to link the classical and the contemporary but he brought also an edge that was unsparing of cruelty and wickedness."
Marvin Hartley Bell was an American poet and teacher who was the first Poet Laureate of the state of Iowa.
Lorna Gaye Goodison CD is a Jamaican poet, essayist and memoirist, a leading West Indian writer, whose career spans four decades. She is now Professor Emerita, English Language and Literature/Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan, previously serving as the Lemuel A. Johnson Professor of English and African and Afroamerican Studies. She was appointed Poet Laureate of Jamaica in 2017, serving in the role until 2020.
Coleman Barks is an American poet, and former literature faculty at the University of Georgia. Although he neither speaks nor reads Persian, he is a popular interpreter of Rumi, rewriting the poems based on other English translations.
Jim Weaver McKown Barnes is an American writer who was born near Summerfield, Oklahoma. He received his BA from Southeastern State University and his MA and Ph.D. from the University of Arkansas. He taught at Truman State University from 1970 to 2003, where he was Professor of Comparative Literature and Writer-in-Residence. After retiring from Truman State, he was Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing at Brigham Young University until 2006. On January 15, 2009, Barnes was named Oklahoma Poet Laureate for 2009–2010. He describes his ancestry as "an eighth Choctaw" and "a quarter Welsh".
Philip Lee Williams is an American novelist, poet, and essayist noted for his explorations of the natural world, intense human relationships, and aging. A native of Athens, Georgia, he grew up in the nearby town of Madison. He is the winner of many literary awards including the 2004 Michael Shaara Prize for his novel A Distant Flame, an examination of southerners who were against the Confederacy’s position in the American Civil War. He is also a winner of the Townsend Prize for Fiction for his novel The Heart of a Distant Forest, and has been named Georgia Author of the Year four times. In 2007, he was recipient of a Georgia Governor’s Award in the Humanities. Williams's The Divine Comics: A Vaudeville Show in Three Acts, a 1000-page re-imagining of Dante's magnum opus, was published in the fall of 2011. His latest novel, Emerson's Brother, came out in May 2012 from Mercer University Press
Ron Smith is an American poet and the first writer-in-residence at St. Christopher's School in Richmond, Virginia.
The Chattahoochee Review is a literary journal published by Georgia State University's Perimeter College. It is widely regarded as one of the leading voices in Southern fiction and was established in 1981. The journal contains fiction, poetry, and non-fiction.
Arthur Sze is an American poet, translator, and professor. Since 1972, he has published ten collections of poetry. Sze's ninth collection Compass Rose (2014) was a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Sze's tenth collection Sight Lines (2019) won the 2019 National Book Award for Poetry.
David Clewell was an American poet and creative writing instructor at Webster University. From 2010–2012, he served as the Poet Laureate of Missouri.
Chelsea Rathburn is an American poet.
The Townsend Prize for Fiction is awarded biennially to a writer from the U.S. state of Georgia for the best novel published during those years, by the Georgia Center for the Book and The Chattahoochee Review the literary journal of Perimeter College at Georgia State University. The award was named in honor of the founding editor of Atlanta magazine, Jim Townsend. It was first granted in 1982.
The Poet Laureate of Georgia is the poet laureate for the U.S. state of Georgia. The position was created in 1925 by proclamation of the governor. The position was codified with the Georgia Council for the Arts providing a list of three nominees for the governor's selection at the start of term.
